[casi-analysis] [1] Neocon Ledeen's daughter with CPA in Baghdad [2] Rendon update

[info@DELETETHISuncoverIraq.com]

[ This message has been sent to you via the CASI-analysis mailing list ]

Everyone,

[1] Simone Ledeen, daughter of neocon Michael ('total war') Ledeen, is among
those working for the CPA in Iraq.  As advisor for northern Iraq at the Ministry
of Finance in Baghdad, Ms. Ledeen is one among many inexperienced, politically
connected ideologues who have inundated the CPA ("Can't Produce Anything") and
contributed to its ineptness.  A cutting Washington Monthly piece by Joshua
Micah Marshall and others is appended below.

For a portrait of Ms. Ledeen's rather frightening father, see Brian Whitaker's
piece from last February:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,901982,00.html.

[2] The Rendon Group's bid for involvement in the "Iraqi Media Network" has
become public.  TRG did a clever thing, bidding with major corporate partners
whose reputations are unsullied concerning Iraq (at least, to my knowledge).
Principal vendor on the bid is WorldSpace, purveyor of XM Satellite Radio.
Below I've appended the Economist's take on Iraq's media (they appear to
distrust Rendon's history as much as I).  Winners of the $98-million bid should
be announced shortly.

The WorldSpace press release on the bid is here:
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/031211/dcth008_1.html.  For rants on TRG, see
http://www.casi.org.uk/discuss/2002/msg00838.html or
http://www.guerrillanews.com/media/doc3600.html.

A cautionary note.  Those following Rendon may be aware of Australian TV's Paul
Moran, who was killed during the war and who was claimed by some to be a Rendon
employee.  Note that this claim has been strongly denied by ABC's Eric Campbell.
 However, this denial has now also has been challenged.  See
http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/000457.php for a recap.

Regards,
Drew Hamre
Golden Valley, MN USA

===
[1] http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0312.whoswho.html
The Washington Monthly's Who's Who
December 2003

By Joshua Micah Marshall, Laura Rozen, and Colin Soloway
Simone Ledeen is serving her country. She is the daughter of Michael Ledeen, the
Iran-Contra luminary, AEI scholar, and all-around capo in the neocon mafia.
She's 29, a freshly-minted M.B.A., with little to no experience in war-torn
countries. But as an advisor for northern Iraq at the Ministry of Finance in
Baghdad, she is, in essence, helping shape one quarter of that nation's economy.

When the history of the occupation of Iraq is written, there will be many
factors to point to when explaining the post-conquest descent into chaos and
disorder, from the melting away of Saddam's army to the Pentagon's failure to
make adequate plans for the occupation. But historians will also consider the
lack of experience and abundant political connections of the hundreds of
American bureaucrats sent to Baghdad to run Iraq through the Coalition
Provisional Authority.

It's not that Americans lack such experience. In the last decade particularly,
many American officials acquired a great deal of expertise in post-conflict
reconstruction in places like Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and in post-Communist
countries in Eastern Europe and around the globe--expertise that could have been
put to good use at the CPA. Names frequently mentioned are those of General Bill
Nash, who commanded troops in the Gulf War and NATO operations in Bosnia; Robert
Perito, former senior foreign service officer and deputy director of the Justice
Department's international police training program, who helped advise
peacekeeping missions in Bosnia, East Timor, Kosovo, and helped organize
post-conflict police training in Albania, Croatia, and Macedonia; Bob Gelbard,
former U.S. presidential envoy to the Balkans; and retired Air Force Maj. Gen.
Jacques Klein, who served in various capacities in the Balkans under the United
States and the United Nations. Yet according to experts in the field, few of
those with experience in these various deployments got the call to serve or even
had their opinions solicited.

In their place, the architects of the war chose card-carrying
Republicans--operatives, flacks, policy-wonks and lobbyists--for almost every
key assignment in the country. Some marquee examples include U.S. civil
administrator Paul Bremer's senior advisor and liaison to Capitol Hill, Tom
Korologos, one of the most powerful GOP lobbyists on Capitol Hill. Then there's
the man in charge of privatizing Iraq's 200-odd state owned companies, Tom
Foley, a venture capitalist and high-flying GOP fundraiser. Foley was one of the
Bob Dole's top-ten career donors, Connecticut finance chair for Bush 2000 and a
classmate of the president's from Harvard Business School.

The chief advisor to the Agriculture Ministry is Dan Amstutz, a Reagan
administration veteran who until recently served as the president of the North
American Export Grain Association. Oxfam's Director of Policy Kevin Watkins
recently quipped that with his record of opening up developing economies to
cheap American agricultural exports, "putting Dan Amstutz in charge of
agricultural reconstruction in Iraq is like putting Saddam Hussein in the chair
of a human rights commission." The presence of so many GOP lobbyists and
fat-cats on the CPA roster has led many to suspect that the staffing was driven
by the desire to award prized contracts to friendly companies and campaign
donors. There is more than a little truth in those impressions. But a closer
look paints a more complex picture.

In the lead-up to war, the architects of the coming invasion fought endless
rearguard battles against their enemies at the State Department and the C.I.A.
to keep the major policy decisions firmly in their hands. And the process
continued as they began to staff CPA itself, where they wrote off not only State
Department employees (considered disloyal because State had resisted the hawks
over Iraq strategy) but also anyone who worked at NGO's (ideologically suspect)
and those who had worked in Clinton's government (ditto).

**********
By making partisan loyalty their primary criteria, the administration ruled out
most of the people with experience in the field and restricted themselves to
politically trustworthy Republicans, many of whom, though often well-meaning and
admirably willing to serve their country in a very dangerous place, had little
to no experience to prepare them for the challenges they'd encounter in Iraq.

A typical example is Dan Senor. Before attending Harvard Business School from
1999 to 2001, Senor was a staffer for then-Sen. Spencer Abraham of Michigan.
After receiving his MBA, he went to the Carlyle Group, where he was a venture
capitalist from 2001 to 2003. Senor left Carlyle in 2003 for a brief stint as
White House Press Secretary Scott McLellan's deputy before shipping off to Iraq.
Though he showed up in Iraq as a junior press handler, Senor is now Bremer's
senior advisor and for most of last summer he was in charge of organizing Iraq's
post-Saddam media, an effort which most have rated as little short of a
disaster. More examples can be found at the Ministry of Education, often cited
by the White House as one of the CPA's signal successes. Who runs the Ministry
of Education? The chief American advisor to the Minister of Education is
Williamson Evers, a school voucher advocate and Libertarian activist from the
Hoover Institution who was an education policy advisor on the Bush 2000
campaign. The first of Evers's two deputies is Leslye Arsht, a Republican
education policy wonk who served as deputy press secretary under Ronald Reagan
and then in the Department of Education under George H.W. Bush. Evers's second
deputy was Jim Nelson, President George W. Bush's education commissioner from
when he was governor of Texas. (Nelson recently returned stateside.)

Each of the three has education policy credentials. But one searches their
résumés in vain for any evidence of the sort of expertise that would suit them
to rebuild an educational system in an Arab country in the aftermath of war, a
decade of sanctions, and two generations of totalitarian rule.

To date, Evers and his team have resisted the urgings of their colleagues back
in Washington to foist on Iraq vouchers and other schemes conservatives have
thus far failed to get enacted in the United States. But critics say that even
the much-hyped successes getting schools refurbished and reopened may not stand
up to scrutiny. The White House routinely trumpets the fact that 1,595 of Iraq's
10,000 schools have already been rehabilitated. But when Newsweek reporters
visited five of those schools in October, they found each one trash-strewn,
poorly supplied, and mostly a wreck.

More such "help" may be on the way in the person of Rich Galen, veteran GOP-spin
meister, former spokesman for Vice President Dan Quayle and onetime head of Newt
Gingrich's GOPAC. In late October, Galen received the call to serve his country
in Iraq as yet another of Bremer's Senior Advisors. His gig? Adding more
artillery to the Iraq War spin operation. "My job," Galen told The New York Post
before shipping off, "will be to help reporters on the ground find interesting
stories that they can use. If there's a civil-affairs unit out of Manhattan that
rebuilt a school, it might be of interest to Channel 5 but not to a network."

CPA officials say that the older GOP functionaries do a reasonable job keeping
their partisanship publicly under wraps. But the younger Republicans in Iraq
spend much of their time plotting against the Democrats. "Everything is seen in
the context of the election, and how they will screw the Democrats," said one
CPA official. "It was really pretty shocking to hear them talk."

"They are all on the campaign trail," said another official. "They see this as a
stepping stone to a better job in the next Bush administration." "I don't always
know if they are Republicans," said yet another senior CPAer. "But what is clear
is that they know nothing about development, and nothing about transitional
economies." They're trying to do the right thing, this official adds, "but they
do what they do without any knowledge of how the post-war world works in
reality. They come up with hare-brained schemes that cause so many problems they
take more time to fix than to create."

It's also driven journalists on the ground, watching these operatives move in
and out of Saddam's marble Republican Palace, which CPA commandeered as its
headquarters, to joke: "They don't call it the Republican Palace for nothing."

*****
Joshua Micah Marshall is a Washington Monthly contributing writer and author of
Talkingpointsmemo.com. Laura Rozen is a national security writer in Washington,
D.C. Colin Soloway is a contributing editor of Newsweek.


===
[2] http://www.economist.com/World/africa/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=2287043
Iraq's television  --  A chance missed

Dec 11th 2003 | BAGHDAD
>From The Economist print edition

America has failed to promote freedom of expression—or its own message

“THERE is no information available at this time,” reads the message on the
website of the Iraqi Media Network, the intended precursor of a hoped-for
revamped state broadcasting service and the Americans' main purveyor of news in
Arabic that, after 30 years of state lies, is meant to be true. “Please check
back.”

Iraqis have been checking for eight months, baffled by how a nation with the
world's most vibrant media can leave them still yearning for something they
actually want to watch. So dull is the present service that some Iraqis may even
hanker for the days when Saddam Hussein's delinquent son Uday ran the
television. As a result, far more Iraqis watch two Arab satellite channels,
al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, both of which seem to revel in America's local
tribulations.

Part of the problem is that the Pentagon assigned Iraq's broadcasting to a
defence contractor, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). So
far, the firm has shown as much aptitude for delivering news as the BBC would if
it had to deliver missiles. It charged the Pentagon $100m in operating and
infrastructure costs but paid its broadcasters $30 a week. It hired the same
performers who sang praises to Mr Hussein as “the servant of God” to sing odes
to Iraq's new-found freedom. State TV is required to relay the statements of the
ruling American-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and its appointed
Iraqi Governing Council, earning it a reputation as the Pentagon's Pravda. Freed
from Saddam's ban on satellite dishes, a third of Iraqis have switched to other
stations.

The failure to provide useful or interesting information is not just SAIC's; it
is symptomatic of a more general speech impediment. Not only does the CPA not
speak Iraq's language; it rarely deigns to speak at all. Gary Thatcher, Mr
Bremer's communications adviser, does not communicate himself, and often bars
CPA officials, bunkered behind their concrete bollards, from answering press
inquiries directly. This fosters suspicion and rumour, making the CPA seem
remote and prickly. Mr Bremer rarely invites Arab journalists to his press
conferences. In such self-imposed solitude, the CPA is struggling to get its
message across.

Too late for a remedy? SAIC's contract is up for renewal next month and has been
put up for tender. The money on offer—$98m a year for two years—at first
attracted a welter of interested parties, including the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation, the BBC and Britain's Independent Television News. The British
apparently tried to persuade Mr Bremer that Iraq needs a public broadcaster,
independent of the government and regulated by law, for its fledgling democracy.

It has yet to happen. Proposals to keep broadcasting out of the hands of the
executive have collided with vested interests in Washington. If you give $100m,
you expect some say in how it is spent, they say. The BBC, among others, is
shying away. Of 28 potential bidders, only three are primarily broadcasters.
Others include specialists in engineering and arms, and the Rendon Group, a
public-relations firm paid by the CIA to help the Iraqi National Congress and
its leader, Ahmed Chalabi. Even SAIC may still be interested.

Most Iraqis are in the dark about all of this. The Governing Council gave
warning that if the American administration let foreigners run Iraq's
broadcasting service without consultation, the transitional government due to
take office in July would sever the contract.

In its search for a voice, the council has sought editorial control and a say in
appointing staff. But its own commitment to press freedom is iffy. Last month,
it ordered al-Arabiya to shut its Baghdad office.

_______________________________________
Sent via the CASI-analysis mailing list
To unsubscribe, visit http://lists.casi.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/casi-analysis
All postings are archived on CASI's website at http://www.casi.org.uk